New Delhi, September 29 (TNA) The Supreme Court on Tuesday set aside the preventive detention of Mulla Afroz in the Sambhal violence case and directed the Uttar Pradesh government to pay ₹10 lakh in costs. The bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu held that the state authorities had wrongly exercised their preventive detention power.
The court said an extra-judicial confession, by itself, cannot justify detention under the National Security Act. It observed that the detaining authority must also look at other relevant and substantive circumstances before reaching subjective satisfaction.
In Afroz’s case, the court found that the authorities failed to consider those additional factors. It therefore quashed the detention order, set aside the High Court’s ruling that had upheld it, and imposed the cost on the state for what it called an illegal detention order.
The case arose from the violence in Sambhal in November 2024, during a court-ordered survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid. Afroz was arrested in January 2025 in connection with related cases, and his detention under the NSA was later challenged before the courts.